


Grand Theft Intermission

by Beabaseball (beabaseball)



Series: Roadtrip Vigilantes [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, Moral Dilemmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 12:11:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13717428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beabaseball/pseuds/Beabaseball
Summary: Continued from Unconsolable. Part of Roadtrip Vigilantes.Bruce is still trying to figure out the details of crimestopping when you have to stay for the fallout. Because he won't do as Gordon asks: Batman is staying in Gotham.





	Grand Theft Intermission

**Author's Note:**

> i'm so tired guys. but you gotta be kind. You gotta keep caring and you gotta keep trying to negotiate where you are in this world, and you gotta try to be kind.
> 
>  
> 
>  **What you need to know if you haven’t read earlier stuff:** Bruce stayed with the League of Assassins until meeting Dick and they went into hiding together. They have only recently gotten to Gotham to settle down under protection from the JL.

A week after Jim Gordon tells him to Get Out, a man enters the city anyway.   
  
His name is Bruce today, he supposes. In the coming days, perhaps that is who he will continue to be.  
  
He'd been going by pseudonyms so long with only Dick to call him by his name for three years that sometimes it's jarring to introduce himself to strangers; and he finds himself stumbling through sentences with his hands still outstretched, fumbling through what should be some of the most familiar words in the world to him.   
  
There wasn't any reason to hide his first name anymore. The League-- the Shadows-- already knew where he was by now. He'd been in the same place for more than a week.    
  
Without a doubt, they knew where he was now.    
  
Changing his name wouldn't slow down anything anymore. If Bruce threw his name away, Dick might start thinking he should fully abandon his name, too. The Justice League would look at them strangely and ask even more questions about his sanity, which Bruce would be unable to answer.

In his defense, he somewhat suspected he'd gone insane two and a half years ago and now the outside world just reflected it.  
  
There was a Zeta portal hidden in the empty, decrepit phone booth leftover from the 40s infrastructure boom a block away from Alfred's house in North Gotham, and that block was very little distance to traverse for most Justice Leaguers. They'd alert anyone before exiting Gotham and they had emergency alert buttons hidden on their person--   
  
(in Bruce's teeth)    
  
(‘ _ Cyanide, living dead inside,’  _ a tinny voice belted out from the radio on a red back road in Arkansas)   
  
(at least  _ some  _ things still made sense.)

\--to call for help should it be needed, and to serve as a gateway to rescue otherwise.    
  
...he isn't sure how he feels about needing to be rescued while trying to learn how to do it himself, but he supposes he has no real room to talk, and pulls out his wallet to glance at the picture of Dick Grayson pasted inside.    
  
Nothing to lose anymore by doing that, either.    
  
\--   
  
Batman takes a walk, but his name is Bruce right now, even though he's already trying to think of how to be someone else again. But maybe Bruce is already a stranger enough in Gotham.

He will never be Bruce Wayne again. 

The Justice League had--apparently--forgotten to ask the detail of his last name at some point. They’d been hounding Robin about it for 36 hours, and then, once Batman was awake and inadvertently confirmed his name with a glare, they had just… 

Started calling him that. 

‘Bruce’ and ‘Batman,’ and… forgotten to ask his last name. 

It simply hadn’t come up. He didn’t see how this was possible, seeing as Flash and Green Lantern at the  _ very least  _ were metahuman and assumedly had their own last names, and Martian Manhunter had enough of a grasp on the concept of a last name to spell his alias slightly differently twice in a row, and Wonder Woman, Superman, and Aquaman’s cultures didn’t necessitate a last name, he just…. 

…

Maybe they figured he wasn’t important enough to know, so long as they kept an eye on him. 

Maybe he wasn’t ever going to be Bruce Wayne anymore, so why keep his last name on file, either? To know who he’d  _ been _ ? To know where the first eighteen years of Batman were borrowed?

…

The one who could have been Bruce Wayne read the newspapers in Alfred’s livingroom in the mornings and turned on the TV news at night before heading out. He saw faces he knew; some once recognized from boarding school. A Harvey Dent recovering from a gunshot in the hospital. A distant cousin whose bat mitzvah he attended. Politicians. Movie stars. 

Lex Luthor. 

Lex Luthor, all over, buying up industries, and attempting a monopoly on kryptonite, and pioneering literal Green Energy with it. Lex Luthor wielding more control with a face and a voice than Bruce had ever enacted under Ra’s.

Lex Luthor whose RnD ruled his corporation as he revolutionized everything he touched--

But people in Metropolis were still underpaid and overworked, with a large homeless and poor population and a known place popular for suicide attempts, and a hotspot for mundane savior-ing.

Yet still better than Gotham, which should’ve had a booming fishing industry with tourism, and art shows, and with a vivid history comparable to London. Their ghost tours alone should’ve had a viable economy, but instead, they had the third highest violent crime rates in the United States and jack else to show for it. 

...Gotham was a better place when he was a child. It was a better place when Martha Wayne had her foundations, and Thomas Wayne had his clinic, and the world had been a better place overall. At least this corner of it.

...Gotham shouldn’t  _ need  _ a millionaire family looking after her. She shouldn’t need Batman, either. In a good world, things would be fine on their own. 

In this world, they needed the help, and walking down damp Gotham streets late at night, Bruce looks up at the yellow streetlights and admits that everything would’ve been better if he’d just been a dumb millionaire with a clear conscience.

\--

In Central Gotham, ten blocks south of Alfred’s split level Queen Anne and across the bridge, there’s a park. Robinson Park. It stretches a good three miles long, from the Coventry down to the Diamond District across the Finger River, with a lake reservoir at its heart and a bus station to the north. 

(The last time he’d been in a park he’d nearly died, but Robinson Park doesn’t have a jungle gym.)

A greenhouse garden open to the public also rears its head to the south of the park, with rare flowers overgrown and taking over their protected case, but Bruce isn’t walking that far.

The park is surrounded by… hedges.  
  
Nothing sinister about that, really. They’re a good divider between the highways and the park, and theoretically could stop children from wandering too close to traffic, or serve as a small barrier in a car crash if a vehicle were to swerve off the road towards them-- Bruce thinks they may actually be rather effective in that car crash scenario. The bushes before him are a good six feet tall at least, perhaps a full two meters, and a good half meter wide at minimum, but in some places it’s grown unruly and become even wider. When he pushes on them, there’s not much give. The stems are strong and the wood is thick. They move right back into place when he pulls his arm back, and all that’s left is a distinctive, if pleasant, odor on his hand. 

It’s the odor that triggers his memory of this plant. He doesn't know it, not by name, but--there used to be large bushes of this sort outside Wayne Manor. Not quite this tall, admittedly, but Bruce remembers with a strange vividity hiding in the shade of these bushes on a day hot enough the world was hard to look at, eating a popsicle, his hand sticky and unnaturally blue around the stick while the late summer cicadas screamed.

...today, outside Robinson Park, Bruce lowers his hand from his face, but it’s hard to ignore the smell now that’s he’s noticed it. 

It’s very different from mint, he decides. It’s not sharp. But it still has that strange feeling to its scent that makes him think ‘ _ fresh _ .’

…

Here is the ‘sinister’ thing about the hedges: 

It is impossible to see over them.  
  
Even with Bruce’s height, he struggles to make out more than the other edge of the hedge on the inside of the park. He stands a bit above average height. Most people would not be able to see much farther, and many’s sight would be blocked entirely. 

Children would absolutely be unable to see. 

…

This was the problem with Robinson Park: 

You could not see into it. This was what made it a popular place for drug deals and other illicit activities. Things that most parents did not want their children around while trying to let them play. The lack of people in the park fed into the general ability to act illegally without repercussion. Most police officers did not patrol inside, and for those that did, there was no guarantee they were actually doing their jobs or arresting people. There was no guarantee they would handle the people arrested properly. 

After a body was found with a plastic bag over his head and blood on his lips, it was.. even less desirable. 

And so children were not able to play safely outside their houses. Students could not recline outdoors. Adults could not take walks somewhere off the city streets. Schools could not take a class out for a picnic. And there was no attempt to. 

If a problem was out of sight, and you avoided it well enough, it could be out of mind, he supposed. 

\--

While Batman was Bruce, Robin was Richard Malone.

He still preferred to go by ‘Dick.’

Dick and Bruce Malone had been homeless for several years since their last appearance, checking into a roadside hotel in eastern Tennessee. They’d been struggling for a while even before that. There wasn’t much paperwork on them, due to being, well… homeless. 

Alfred, a lonely old man with a soft spot for children and enough savings to manage it, had taken them in as dependents after a long weekend out of state. 

Dick Malone had been homeschooled for a few years officially, but after a year of living with Mr. Pennyworth and the new school year coming up, he was busy being set up for his first year at Gotham Academy following an aptitude test for grade placement. 

...so there was no Robin, either, right now. 

No Robin or Batman for over a week.

There was just Dick Malone, sitting in the walled garden out behind Alfred Pennyworth’s home on the Hill, reading a history book and writing down notes, so that in the evening after dinner, they could go to the garage and do a few things with the car they were building, and then bedtime shortly after so he could be up bright and early the next day.

Dick didn’t protest his newly scheduled life, likely because he hadn’t seen Bruce go out since he settled down and started to actively try to catch up on his… well…

Studies.  

He’d learned a lot, he thought. He knew about math and the legal system, and how to fix a car’s engine, and how to apply makeup. He knew how to backflip into a man’s face and he knew to watch where the gun was aiming, not try to spot the bullet. He knew how to order at a restaurant and how to stitch up a wound. He knew how to hit the organ least likely to kill someone and that there was really no such thing as a ‘non lethal’ injury if you let it go untreated long enough.

He knew less about oceanography and like… plant cells and stuff. And as much as he knew about unclogging a respiratory system and fighting off colds, he couldn’t like… look at a graph and say which thing the larynx was.

Apparently they taught that stuff in sixth and seventh grade now, and if Dick wanted to be in class with peers of his own age group, he needed more integrated sciences and less chemistry. The stuff Bruce had largely forgotten from his high school classes. 

So during his days he hovered over Dick’s notebooks and textbooks from earlier years, and… got re-affiliated with the knowledge of the lower world. One computer with a tab on google at all times and pretty soon their search history looked…. like a sixth grader desperately trying to cram for a test, which was likely as innocent a search record as they could get.

And Bruce told Dick he was just putting off patrolling until they got things settled with school, and got Dick into a ‘normal person’ schedule, and besides, he might as well keep rebuilding his muscle mass after spending so long in bed, right? Those first few nights in Gotham were certainly not his best, liberating as they’d been. 

But maybe it was just something of Gotham herself. 

\--

What was a city at night?

Some bustled on trying to ignore the changing reigns of the heavens. Others pretended they were parties instead of homes. But not all of the city would pretend, Bruce guessed. Sometimes a city at night was still just a lot of houses with the lights turned off. 

Gotham at night had deep, black-like puddles in the sidewalks and in the gutters where plastic bags and leaves filled them up as small trash islands in a sea of concrete. The other bags and bottles and styrofoam blew freely down the street, with only the puddles of water to hold them down, and show just how  _ much  _ trash had passed by that one place.

By a storm drain there was half a broken CD, the other half nowhere in sight, a popsicle stick, and an empty pack of Marlboros. 

In the street, a car ran over a plastic bottle so full of air it went off with a  _ ‘POW _ ,’ and Bruce saw people flinch downward, ducking their heads, waiting for the next gunshot. 

Bruce went down too. He got a few pitting but not  _ confused _ looks as he self consciously returned to his feet, and a wind-blown newspaper smacked into his leg, wrapping around his ankle. 

He knew there were people paid to clean the streets. He'd seen them in bright outfits with dustpans on sticks and brooms, sweeping crumpled receipts and dust off the sidewalks, but there was still always trash like this. Just not enough people to keep up, Bruce supposed. 

_ Just not enough people to keep up _ , he thought, while the newspaper around his ankle rattled, deforming the face of Harvey Dent on its center spread. 

Harvey Dent had gone to highschool with him. Boarding school. Bruce returned to the manor on weekends. Harvey barely wanted to go home for  _ summer.  _ He'd come back from vacations with bruises under his collar and refuse to walk to a shower with anything less than a full bathrobe. 

Bruce tried to think of what you did when a trashcan was full, but you couldn't empty it. 

He supposed that either you stomped the trash down, or you stopped picking it up at all.

\-- 

A week since Harvey Dent had been put in a hospital and Commissioner Gordon had told Batman to Go. A week of being Bruce instead. 

He still didn't know what to do when a trashcan was too full, but you couldn’t empty it--much less when there were people inside. Because as vile as maybe they were, they were still people in that prison. And if you couldn’t treat prisoners like people, then…

He didn’t know what then. 

It was hard to find the words. But it felt like navy blue, and a slippery slope, and a man like Ra’s al Ghul whispering in his ear about  _ acceptable sacrifices _ . 

So as tempting as it was, and even though he could not articulate it, Bruce knew that was not an option. 

But neither was simply leaving criminals on the streets, right? 

You couldn’t just… leave things around that were causing harm. A knife was a tool, but could harm at the same time, especially in an improper place. You needed to put it somewhere safe, away from where it would hurt others. 

He could think of a knife this way, because he could not make the same comparison with a gun. 

( _ Bang bang, my baby shot me down. _ )

\--

There was a suicide by cop that night. 

Batman wasn’t there. 

The cops were. But Batman wasn’t, because he was keeping his promise to Dick Grayson, and struggling with Commissioner Gordon’s order, and saying things to himself like  _ well I wouldn’t even know where to put them anyway _ ,  _ now _ .

But there wasn’t anyone or anything to put anywhere. 

There was just a teenager with an unloaded gun, and cops with fully loaded ones, and  _ what if he’d been there? _

Superman probably would’ve been there, if it’d been in Metropolis. (Superman called Alfred, which was a  _ fuck  _ of a thing to think about if he were honest. Superman called Alfred to ask if Bruce were okay, because they hadn’t seen him on the news lately. Alfred assured the Justice League that Bruce was simply in the garden, helping Dick with his history homework.)

(Superman thought ‘Master Dick’ was an insult. Dick Malone laughed until Bruce literally had to pick him off the floor. 

Alfred made cucumber sandwiches for lunch and cream puffs for dessert, and thirteen hours before, there had been a suicide by cop.)

...Bruce didn’t say anything, and Dick didn’t either, but after he convinced Dick to go to bed that night, he pulled on the suit again and hitched a ride downtown. From the rooftops, it’s about an hour from one side of Gotham to the other. Three hours to do the perimeter if you’re going as fast as you can. Or, it would be three if he were in as good shape as he once was, but right now he’s--coming off of bedrest in the Watchtower and has only been building up his muscles and stamina again… 

It’s faster to get into the heart of Gotham via train, and they go fast enough it’s hard for bystanders to really notice him at all, so long as he steers clear of windows and cameras. 

He doesn’t have to do  _ nothing  _ while trying to figure out a solution. While he thinks, he can still try to protect. 

So maybe this mugger he doesn’t drag to the station. 

He still arrives, intervenes before even the imaginary gunshot can go off in his mind, and follows the victim until they reach their house. 

...he wonders if the mugger would’ve even tried at all tonight if he knew there was a chance of being interrupted like this, with a new bruised shoulder and an aching backside from when he fell on the concrete. If the mugger knew there would be a cell to hold him. A long few years to repent--

But before the cells filled up there had been that. And in other cities, that existed. In Metropolis there were muggings, even if Gotham had more. And Metropolis had  _ fewer _ , with the same laws, but they still existed, and with Superman there, and--

And Bruce was tired of comparing Gotham to Metropolis, shining and pure. 

He was tired of waking up and feeling a blue shadow hanging over him. 

Of Alfred nudging him and saying there was  _ a phone for you, Sir,  _ and knowing exactly who it would be on the other end. 

How in the world had he ended under the gaze and in the footsteps of Superman?

\--

More questions. More important ones. He should focus on those, first.

How did you stop a crime? 

You add a deterrent. You make it less profitable to be a criminal than to be…. Otherwise. So you made being a criminal  _ miserable _ work. You made it frightening. You made it dangerous. Bruce would not kill again, but a broken bone was not a death sentence unless you did it  _ wrong _ . 

But even if he did kill, there would be those who would be stupid enough, or desperate enough, or uncaring enough to try anyway. 

He remembers a white middle aged man with long greyed hair robbing a convenience store at knifepoint. He had a wife and teenage daughter at home. He had a pile of debts. He killed himself after a month into his five-year sentence. 

How did you deter that? 

(if he looked up Tony Zucco’s history, he couldn’t find at what point the man became a mobster. It was just papers and papers and family history, and one day, suddenly the first crime he was identified as an accomplice in appeared, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a Before, and Bruce didn’t know enough about humans, about  _ people _ , aside from how they broke--)

How did you deter someone who feared no pain? Who feared no failure? 

Who felt they had nothing left to lose, even if you thought they were wrong? 

….

Even if he’d failed to stop Tony Zucco, how could he have stopped  _ Robin? _

Maybe that was the way to look at it. 

And at least, unlike with Tony Zucco, when it came to Robin, he had somewhere to start.

\--

Bruce goes on a walk wearing a mask. It isn't Batman’s mask, but it is a mask nonetheless. It's made of makeup and a wig and sewn into his hair. Dick bought him an orange reflective vest and a white helmet from a sports goods store, along with some winter gloves to fight off the upcoming Gotham chill. 

Alfred merely lent him the pruning shears and electric saw. Despite his disguise, he is still self-conscious on his way to middle-Gotham at night, moreso than he perhaps ought to be as a simple municipal worker off to do some nightwork while it won't disturb the locals. But perhaps it's because he's on the streets and not the rooftops, and he has somewhere to  _ go  _ rather than all his aimless wandering from before. 

If he simply wanders, there isn't anything  _ ruinable _ , unlike if say, you have a plan. 

There's a bulletproof vest under his disguise and some basic chainmail over more dangerous areas that won't stop a bullet per se, but it will prevent damage to arteries in the event there's something going on he happens to be interrupting--but he's also scouted out the park a few times now, and Tuesday night is a slow one for crime in the area it seems. So at the very least he has lowered his possibility of direct disruption. 

Direct disruption requires a different mask, very unlike the safety goggles he pulls down over his eyes.   


It still sounds unbearably loud when he starts up the handsaw, lifts it up to about chest level, and cuts into the first of the bushes that surround the park. It was a messy, uneven cut, but he could come back to straighten up later if he had to once the job was done. 

He was half a block down before the bushes fought back. 

The saw caught suddenly between the branches, as if suctioned into something much much sturdier than simple tree limbs-- and he heard a voice behind him, as if whispering in his ear, speak. 

“ _ How dare you. _ ”

Someone kicked him across the face. Held in place by the bush, he released the saw handles and twisted to catch himself before he hit the ground. 

He wasn't sure he'd succeeded and avoided hitting his head when the sound of crunching metal caught his ears, and when he looked up and saw a naked woman standing above him. 

(The naked part caught his attention before her skin color did, perhaps as he thought her a white woman in very unusual lighting, but she was under  _ orange  _ streetlights, naked, and green.)

“How  _ dare _ you!” she snarled, teeth barring, but she didn't step closer. Bruce really wasn't fully sure what he'd do if she did, splayed on his back with his arms up at his sides. He  _ must  _ have hit his head. “You human scum-- this bush is older than your grandfathers! And you  _ dare  _ to chop it down.”

The orange of the streetlight made a lion’s mane of her red hair, and in a brief moment of clarity, he realized that perhaps the drug transactions hadn't been the only reason people avoided the park. 

“Do you know what that was?” she snarled, leaning down closer. 

Something thick and cold wrapped around his neck, choking him. He was more focused on that than the question, or the spittle that sprayed from her white, white teeth--

“ _ Do you know? _ ” she hissed again. The vine around his neck gave a tug and Bruce’s spine arched up as he gagged.

He shook his head, but didn’t know if she saw or cared-- she continued without a pause-- 

“It was an American Boxwood!  _ Buxus sempervirens _ . It can take a hundred and fifty years for them to reach this size, and you simply think you can cut them short!?”

He clawed uselessly at the vine around his neck with one hand, tears forced out of his eyes as his face grew hot and painful. The metahuman was still screaming at him, but a growing ringing in his ears made it harder and harder to make out the words--

His one jerking hand shook its way down to his pocket. He hardly realized he was doing it-- only that he had to do  _ something _ \--and gripped something small and round in his numb, cold fingers. 

And his thumbnail chipped the outer shell.

The resulting explosion was enough to cut off the vine wrapped around his neck, but even though he was free to take in breath something still felt like it was stopping him. Little more than coughs and sputters came out of his throat at first before everything started to bounce back and a sharp, painful breath finally passed his lips and filled up his lungs.

But he was free. Free enough, before the polyfoam he’d developed in a hotel bathroom with Dick all those months ago pinned him entirely. His training and instinct was enough to drag his flailing body away from the metahuman now. 

Some of the foam gripped to him as he tried to flail away, but he avoided the worst-- it pinned her legs and one arm in place to the ground, but Bruce managed to just lose his one pant leg in a heavy brown cast a few feet away, hacking so hard the spasms themselves ripped it free before it settled and pinned him down, too. 

“--is this? What did you do!?” he heard her shouting. 

She’d find out it was harmless in a moment. She’d realize she could still bring up another vine and finish him off while he was helpless. He-- he had to do something. 

He’d told Dick he was just going on a walk. 

He forced himself up, wheezing, his stomach twisting, and shoved his hand into his pocket again. 

“ _ NO _ !” she howled. 

He broke another polyfoam pellet and hurtled it in her direction. It--it was not a good throw, wobbling in the air and smacking into the sidewalk barely a few feet away, covering the same pile already on her legs. 

His arms hurt. He saw her one arm reaching out as she screamed, and he grabbed another of what was in his pocket, throwing it blindly--

He fell over, listing hard to the side, and paid attention no more. 

He was too busy heaving, sick and wet climbing up his throat and ripping themselves hot out his mouth. His eyes wouldn’t focus anymore and the world disappeared into a haze of static. 

…

…

When he woke again, his eyes were still swimming, but he thought he heard someone scream, so he had to get up. 

It took him a long few second to even recognize screaming, but he heard a sound and had to get up, even though he was blinking nonexistent shadows out of his eyes and his arms shook as he tried to push himself up to his knees. 

Breathing hurt. But someone was screaming. 

He rolled himself over and slumped on his knees, trying to see what was happening, and a monster loomed over him. 

It was brown and lumpy, like an anthill that had grown far larger and wider than a human could, and it had no mouth to scream with, and it wasn’t moving. 

…

It was polyfoam. 

It was polyfoam on top of that metahuman. 

Oh fuck. 

Oh, fuck, was she suffocating?

Oh  _ fuck _ . 

He couldn’t kill again. 

He dragged himself to his feet in a way that felt much, much faster and vertigo-inducing than it looked. Oh god. 

He needed water to dissolve the foam. Did he have water? 

Where was water?

There was a puddle on the road from the night’s earlier downpour--because it was  _ always  _ rainy in Gotham; this hadn’t had time to evaporate but also hadn’t overflown into a drainage ditch. 

He wobbled upright and raced as best he could to the puddle, tearing the hard-hat from his head and using it to scoop up a handful of water without losing it. 

He raced to the polyfoam statue and poured where he thought her mouth had to be. About there, at the small node that had to cover her head--

The foam fizzled and began to run down the front of the statue in a thick, grey liquid. A little hole was formed. 

He thought he saw something moving in the shadows.

He raced back for another scoop of water, and this time, he heard the woman inside gasp out a breath. 

“It’s okay,” he tried to say, but it came out torn and ragged. It sounded nothing like his voice at all--shredded and breathy and full of blood. 

When he tried to swallow to clear his throat, he tasted iron and winced in pain. 

He tried to talk again. 

“Just keep calm…”

...he wanted to fall over again. 

...he did. He stumbled to the ground and lowered himself onto the curb, woozy and watching the polyfoam that’d been run loose drip into the street. 

He put his head between his knees and tried not to vomit. Under the blood, he could taste bile and acid.

… 

He coughed again, hard and wet, and raised his head after a few long minutes, looking for a phone booth. 

...it was a long walk, or it felt like one. He slid to the bottom of the phone booth and wondered if he had a quarter. 

No. Hadn’t thought he’d need one. 

He’d bring quarters in the future. 

...he ripped the bottom of the phone open and fiddled with the wires with hazy eyes, trying to figure out who to call. 

Gordon didn’t want more prisoners. He didn’t know what to do. Did she even deserve prison? No, she saw someone doing something she didn’t like and immediately tried to kill him, that was… that was bad. But it was against him-- had she done anything against others? 

Would they lock her up for simply being metahuman? 

... _ violent  _ metahuman, he told himself. 

He could be considered violent maybe-human, he told himself, reaching up to try and punch in the numbers. 

He’d almost killed someone tonight, too. Maybe he’d successfully killed someone, if she’d swallowed too much foam and it turned out to be toxic, or if she’d suffered damage from oxygen deprivation, or if those bushes were actually connected to her lifeforce somehow, or if--

… 

Fuck. 

Fuck. 

Whatever. 

“Gordon residence,” a familiar voice answered the phone. 

“Come to second street on the corner of Robinson Park,” he rasped. “There’s been a metahuman attack. Bring only your trusted officers and a pair of women’s clothes.” 

He heard something screech on the other end of the line. The sound of a chair scraping across the floor, or metal against something else. Bruce wasn’t sure if it was even as loud as it sounded to him. 

“Who is this?” Gordon snarled. “How did you get this number!” 

He’d memorized it as soon as he’d learned where he was living. Did Gordon not know he was in the phone book? Did Gordon not.. 

Ugh… 

Bruce grimaced, sliding to the floor of the phone booth, trying to breathe through the blood in his mouth. 

“Tell me what’s going on!” he heard faintly through the phone, and for once, it was easy to ignore orders. 

“Second street on the corner of Robinson Park,” he repeated, and let the phone hang loose on its cord. He hit the wires he’d tied together with the side of his glove, and watched them break apart and the phone go dead. More destruction for the strained city finances to fix. He should… he should buy burner phones instead, so he didn’t have to rely on phone booths. He should… 

He should’ve called Alfred and begged to be picked up. 

… 

He got up, staggering out of the phone booth, away from the shrieking statue just a few yards away, and back into the Gotham dark. 

\--

...Dick sat by his bed while Bruce recovered. He was there when Bruce stumbled through the door the night before, and he was there as Alfred started to chide him loudly while also grabbing Bruce’s shoulders and supporting him into the house and to the couch, laying him down on his side and loosening the top of the uniform with deft fingers even though Bruce was recovering more now, a good twenty minutes since he’d been attacked. 

But Dick was there, watching and wide-eyed as Bruce came back from what he said would be just a walk, torn up by prickled vines and with the faint lines of a bruise on his neck. 

Bruce had told him he’d be back from a walk. Bruce had said it was just a walk. 

… 

Bruce let Alfred bandage him up. He’d never told Dick how to bandage strangulation. No one had ever gotten ahold of them long enough for that. 

_ “It doesn’t look that…”  _ Dick’s voice faded away from him, to the ringing in his ears.    


“ _ Strangulation doesn’t have to look bad to be fatal _ .” 

He could feel a little hand gripping his own, and he gave a small squeeze back, and closed his eyes, and hoped that Alfred knew what he was doing 

...so Dick sat by Bruce as he recovered, while the breathing tube was removed from his throat and Alfred called an old friend who ran a free clinic down somewhere in Gotham’s streets how to check for vomit in the lungs. And he was there when Bruce started getting coherent again, when he came back to the waking world wondering how long he’d spent passed out these last few weeks, what lasting damage that might look like down the road with so much head trauma lately--

“Hi,” Dick said quietly, looking up from his book (maths, notebook propped up between his knees, pencil in its crease) as he spotted Bruce’s eyes starting to focus on the stucco of the ceiling above them. There was a window in this room. It was open. There was a damp, humid breeze blowing in. It was warm, blowing in from over the Atlantic. 

“Hi,” Bruce croaked quietly. He could feel the imprint of a breathing tube in his throat even though it was no longer there. “...”

He didn’t know what else to say after the greeting. Dick seemed to interpret it anyway, because he started sighing again. 

“...’m okay. I just wish you’d said you were going…” 

“I didn’t plan to get in a fight,” Bruce said, eyes flicking over to watch Dick’s shoulders hunch. 

“Yeah, well…” The kid shrugged again. But at least he looked a little relieved. It didn’t ease the guilt in Bruce much, though.

He closed his eyes. It was easier than keeping them open and staring at the light in the ceiling. 

“...can you check the news for me?” he whispered. 

He heard Dick moving, and assumed a nod. The closing of a schoolbook. The creak of the flimsy notebook shutting and being set down. The squeak and creak of Dick’s chair as he adjusted himself to pull his phone out of his pocket. “What am I lookin’ for?” 

“Metahuman in Gotham.”

He heard Dick’s pause, even. Heard how his clothing wasn’t moving anymore, and the dull tap of fingers on the screen of his phone had stopped. 

...and then it started again, slower, cautious. 

“...there’s a news story about, uh, a metahuman who got arrested and is gonna be sent to Blackgate… ‘apprehended outside Robinson Park following a call about a disturbance. When police arrived on the scene there were signs of struggle, destroyed bushes, and discarded weapons…’”

He felt Dick’s eyes turning to bore into him, but honestly, all Bruce could think of at that moment was that he’d left Alfred’s hedge trimmers behind, and groaned. 

“...B, is she who did this?” came Dick’s little voice. It hadn’t quite started to crack with puberty yet, but soon, he suspected… 

“...I startled her,” Bruce said, trying to lift his hand to rub his temples and eyes. It was heavier than it should’ve been, but at least he could move with relative ease. “...she shouldn’t be in Blackgate.”

“She almost killed you,” Dick said, and Bruce could hear the frown in his voice. “She’s suspected of being part of a lot of the scares around the park in recent years.”

“But we don’t know for sure,” Bruce said, grunting as he tried to sit up in bed, opening his eyes again finally to find--ah, yes. Dick was pouting rather furiously at him. 

Some things didn’t change, he guessed. 

“And it will still be a long time before she gets a trial; she shouldn’t be sent there just because…” 

Metas were hard to contain. Especially when the full extent of their powers were unknown. Especially when they were already violent. 

She  _ should  _ be contained. Blackgate was one of the few prisons capable of holding metas routinely, but: a prison was for  _ prisoners _ . 

He rubbed his face with both hands this time, palms mashing his eyes and a low grumble aching his throat. 

He should’ve de-escalated it somehow. He should’ve figured out how to do something without almost encasing her in polymer foam. Should’ve checked the inside of the hedges for something other than people. Made sure he had all the facts and then some. Treated it as if he knew for a fact he’d be attacked, then he wouldn’t have been taken off guard and made to scramble, how come he could be so wired in civilian clothes but the moment he went out alone at night he lost all sense of self-preservation and situational awareness. If Dick had been with him then what if the target had been… 

When he lowered his hands again, Dick was still frowning at him, notebook and text laying forgotten on the bedside table. 

“You’re not as bad a person as you always think,” he said, huffing. He must’ve thought he saw something on Bruce’s face again. 

He was wrong, anyway. Bruce rolled his eyes without really being able to help it. “You only say that because you’re a child.”

And Dick scowled up at him. “...you always trust me in fights. Why can’t you ever trust me outside of them?”

…

Bruce didn’t have an answer for that. 

...he just sighed, and slumped down in bed again, and tried to get back to sleep. 

...he didn’t succeed for a while, though. He lay there quietly, staring at the open window and the curtains blowing inside from the ocean breeze, and the garden under the overcast sky beyond it. Eventually, he heard Dick’s chair squeak and creak again, and the re-opening of a stiff book, and the scratching of a pencil. He imagined Dick by his bedside, knees curled up near his chest and feet on the chair, face buried into the book, using one page to read and the other to hold his notebook as he studied for school. 

Bruce had spent most of his life training his body. He thought he'd also been training his mind. Listening to Ra’s speeches. Traveling the world. Practicing smuggling, different languages, how to sneak around any security system and hack into pacemakers and create men who had never existed before. 

...he supposed no matter how much you traveled, if you only sought out the underworld, all you would find was darkness. 

He still had a lot to learn, perhaps. How to walk his city’s streets again safely. Why no one went in Robinson Park. How to stop crime before it even started. What to do when a trashcan was full, but you couldn’t empty it, and still had more to throw away. What to do when it wasn’t trash inside, but people. 

He remembered a hot New Jersey summer, and eating a popsicle in the shade of the old manor’s hedges, and the smell they left on his hands.

…

He could start with a book on gardening. 

**Author's Note:**

> Victims of strangulation can die even later than 36 hours after strangulation with no visible external injuries. Women are six times more likely to die from strangulation than men, usually from abusive situations, but Indigenous women, Latina women, trans women, and black women are an underrepresented group in medical studies so we don’t know how accurate that figure is in other circumstances. If you or someone you know has been strangled, please seek immediate medical attention as soon as possible and seek shelter. Anytime someone places their hands on your neck, they bring you very close to death.
> 
> https://www.strangulationtraininginstitute.com/health-issues-result-from-strangulation/  
> http://www.forensichealthcare.com/strang_handouts/strangulation-trng-ppt-handout.pdf


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